momagri, movement for a world agricultural organization, is a think tank chaired by Christian Pèes.It brings together, managers from the agricultural world and important people from external perspectives, such as health, development, strategy and defense. Its objective is to promote regulationof agricultural markets by creating new evaluation tools, such as economic models and indicators,and by drawing up proposals for an agricultural and international food policy.

“Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.”

February 10, 2014

Fifty years after the speech by Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana and hero of Pan-Africanism, this dream of an African continent being a power on the international scene, was still resonating during the latest Summit of the African Union (AU) on 30th to 31st January in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

With agriculture and food security as the central theme, it was the occasion to celebrate the 10th anniversary of NEPAD’s (New Partnership for Africa’s Development) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). This plan, drawn-up during the Maputo Summit in 2003, stipulated that African countries should spend 10% of their expenditure on agriculture.

Although hailed by the FAO, with José Graziano da Silva congratulating the significant commitment by African Heads of State to eliminate hunger on the continent by 2025, the summit demonstrated, that despite some progress, the leaders of the African Union are in lack of a strategic vision for the future of Agriculture in order to fully realize the continent’s agricultural revolution.

In Africa, 70% of the working population is employed in agriculture, compared to 43% globally1. Yet Africa has still not achieved self-sufficiency, while China and India, which have 3 to 6 times less arable land available, have done so. Indeed, Africa imports about $50 billion of food each year (International Labour Organization, 2013), even though as a continent it has enough resources to produce enough food to meet the needs of its 1.1 billion inhabitants.

Low investment in this sector is one of the reasons why the plan is having difficulty getting off the ground. Only 2 to 4% of the budgets of African countries are devoted to agriculture, while 32% of GDPs depend on it and there is not enough development aid aimed at agriculture. Consequently, lack of funding for agricultural research is one of the main obstacles to a green revolution in Africa. Only 8 countries have achieved the objectives of Maputo adopted in 2003 which asked for 10% of GDP be devoted to agricultural development.

The Summit’s participants acknowledge that the development of the agricultural sector is an indispensable prerequisite in the economic development of a nation, “a key sector in the transformation of the continent”. But this development cannot be achieved without a national and international policy that include and protect the continent within global agricultural markets.